


O when will we be whole?

by j_quadrifrons



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Flashbacks, Fridge Horror, Gen, Gore, Hallucinations, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Trauma, canon-typical jonmartin, largely season three
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-11
Updated: 2019-11-11
Packaged: 2021-01-27 19:28:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 3,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21397432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/j_quadrifrons/pseuds/j_quadrifrons
Summary: A handful of Whumptober 2019 prompts, but only a handful because it turns out that the end of an emotionally harrowing season is not a great time to do Whumptober! (Which doesn't mean I won't finish them someday, when I'm in the mood for angst.)
Relationships: Elias Bouchard/Peter Lukas
Comments: 28
Kudos: 70





	1. Day 1: Shaky Hands (Jon)

**Author's Note:**

> _The part of this being that is rock,_  
the part of this body that is star,  
lately I feel them yearning to go back  
and be what they are.
> 
> _As we get closer to the border_  
they whisper sometimes to my soul:  
So long we've been away from order,  
O when will we be whole?
> 
> _Soon enough, my soul replies,_  
you'll shine in star and sleep in stone,  
when I who troubled you a while with eyes  
and grief and wakefulness am gone.  
\--In the Borderlands, Ursula Le Guin

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: vomiting, flashbacks, gore

Jon can’t sleep (unsurprising; he’s never slept well, and now – well) so when he’s sure Georgie has gone to bed he slips out the back door of her building to have a smoke. It isn’t the same place she’d lived last time they were together, obviously, but the ritual of it is familiar enough, placating the Admiral with pets so he doesn’t make a fuss, finding something from the back garden to prop the fire door open and a place sheltered enough that the wind doesn’t blow the smoke back in behind him, and then the more automatic gestures of cigarette, lighter, flame.

The first breath tastes like blood. He flashes back to the vision of Leitner collapsed on the floor of and spattered all over his office, the smoke still in the back of his throat mingling with the heavy stench of gore, the distressingly lumpy quality to some of the spatters. The fleeting thought he’d had that some of those papers were originals, and they’re ruined now, in the endless twenty seconds before it had occurred to him that he should probably be somewhere else.

He retches, harsh and unexpected; the smell hadn’t bothered him when it was right in front of him but now, six hours later, he’s bent double in Georgie’s back garden gasping for air and his hands are shaking too hard to put out the cigarette that he can’t possibly smoke now. He’s still holding his lighter, and he squeezes it hard, focusing on the way the corners dig into his palm, until he can breathe again, but his hands don’t stop shaking until he goes back inside and the Admiral climbs possessively into his lap and stays there until morning.


	2. Day 2: Explosion (Basira)

_Daisy _is the first thing she thinks when she wakes up. She tries to say it but it comes out as a wet rasp. _Punctured lung, _she thinks_, that’s not good. Wait, wasn’t I away from it? I thought I was away from it._ Slowly, painfully, she manages to shift onto her side, and then her back. She is away from it, but apparently not far enough. The ruins of the House of Wax are still collapsing in on themselves, one piece at a time, and she can hear the comforting sound of sirens approaching. _Get out of that one, you plastic bitch_, she thinks with satisfaction, and closes her eyes to focus on breathing.

* * *

“Did anyone else make it out?” she asks the nurse when she wakes up in the hospital room, and the nurse’s face does something complicated.

“You were very lucky,” is what she says, and Basira knows what that means. She closes her eyes and focuses on breathing. It’s still painful, but at least she doesn’t gurgle any more.

* * *

They didn’t find Daisy’s body, and she refuses to find any hope in that. She knows how much C4 they used, and there were definitely more than one woman’s worth of unidentifiable body parts in the rubble. The only thing to do is to put her head down and keep moving. There are people who need her; she doesn’t have time for grief or regret. Still, before she leaves the hospital she spends an hour sitting in another room, listening to the silence where a ventilator ought to be, trying to identify the feeling in her chest. She thinks it might be rage.


	3. Day 3: Delirium (Tim)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: hallucinations

For weeks afterward, Tim finds himself catching something out of the corner of his eye, something that makes him jump far too obviously for comfort. A flash of yellow, a twisting pattern, the hint of a reflection that doesn’t match the room it ought to reflect. Every one of them leaves him reeling for hours, digging his fingers into the hard wooden arms of his chair just to feel something to keep him grounded.

He’ll never forget the dizzy, terrifying sensation of those hallways, the way it felt as if he were walking further and further from himself the deeper they went. He remembers feeling that way once before, during university, when he’d caught something nasty doing fieldwork in Morocco and spent three days sweating out a fever. At least then he’d known what was wrong, or at least someone could remind him of it when he got too lost. Now he just wishes he could say he’s caught Jon’s paranoia, except there really has been another murder and he knows all too well that there are worse things than murderers in the Magnus Institute.

Martin’s still in denial, he can tell. He’s convinced there’s a simple, rational explanation for all of this. Tim knows better. He’s known better for years, it’s why he ended up in the Institute in the first place, but he let himself get complacent, let himself think of it as just another job and forgot what he was here for. So he takes the paranoia, the hallucinations, the fear, and he calls it his penance. When he isn’t sure what’s real any more, when he can’t see anything but spirals when he closes his eyes and they don’t go away when he opens them, he whispers _Sorry, Danny; sorry, Sahsa_ over and over again until he remembers who he is.


	4. Day 4: Human Shield (Gerry)

“Are you serious,” is what comes out of his mouth, which is just as well because it’s a great cover for the absolute panic setting his nerves alight. Unless that’s the effect of having a devotee of the Lightless Flame wrapping an arm around your neck like a python going in for the kill. One minute Gerry is running inventory on one of the more mundane sections of the shop, the next Mary is coming down the stairs and this idiot is reacting like he’s in a low-budget action film.

Mary is looking at them like she’s never seen anything so funny in her life. Gerry wishes desperately that it didn’t make his stomach drop; he should know better by now than to be disappointed by her lack of concern. He can feel the fine hairs on the back of his neck beginning to curl and crackle with the heat and he wonders how long it will be before his skin starts to bubble as well.

“I’m flattered, truly,” Mary says, and the cultist is shaking at Gerry’s back. He tries not to think about bacon sizzling in a pan. “But I’m afraid you’ll need to tell me what you’re so afraid of before I can tell you whether or not you should be worried.”

“I don’t want any trouble,” the cultist says, his breath so hot on Gerry’s neck that sweat starts beading at his hairline.

_Too late_, Gerry thinks, but Mary says, “Of course not. But you do realize you aren’t in any position to negotiate.”

The cultist’s arm tightens, and Gerry fights for breath. He’s determined to stay angry; if he’s angry he can think about something other than the oppressive heat and the smell of hot wax. Anything other than wondering if Mary’s book will accept burned and blistered skin, or his certainty that she would love to find out. Mary smiles, and the cultist sucks in a breath. Gerry spares a moment of sympathy for him. _We’re in this together_, he thinks in the guy’s general direction, and he closes his eyes so he doesn’t have to watch his mother ignore him any more.


	5. Day 5: Held at Gunpoint (Jon, Martin)

Martin tried not to think too hard about why he was spending so much time cataloging tapes. They weren’t even statements any more; he had finished those before Basira was out of the hospital. When Melanie asked why he was bothering with the others he’d shrugged and said it was something to do, and did his best to ignore the look of pity she shot him in return. Jon had – Jon always insisted that he didn’t want to become another mystery, and that was why he carried those tape recorders everywhere. That was seeming more and more unlikely as an explanation, but Martin couldn’t deny that there were plenty of mysteries that the recordings made clearer.

Even though he was waiting for it, he jumped at the sound of the gunshot. Detective Tonner sounded much too calm for someone who’d just committed a murder, cold and unfeeling. _Talk about monsters_, he thought bitterly. Too calm, until she was snarling at Jon about the tape recorder. Martin couldn’t help the images his overactive imagination supplied: Mike Crew’s body oozing blood onto the forest floor, Detective Tonner standing there with a gun in her hand and nothing behind her eyes, Jon –

“P-please don’t shoot me,” Jon begged on the tape, and Martin stopped breathing. He asked one of those questions – _Jon, you absolute idiot_ – and then Basira interrupted them. The tape spooled out to the end before Martin realized he’d stopped taking notes, too hung up again on having feelings that weren’t helping anything at all. And he couldn’t just leave it half-finished; the last thing the Archives needed were more incomplete records. He scrubbed the tears from his face as he rewound the tape back to where he’d left off.


	6. Day 6: Dragged Away (Danny)

Even before he makes it into the theatre itself, the ruins under Covent Garden are just as impressive as he’d hoped. The tunnels are those distinctive smooth stone passageways he’s grown used to seeing scattered around London, and the path he’d traced on his maps is clear and easy to follow. True, it’s maybe a little bit too tidy down here, and he’s aware that it’s not actually late enough to be certain that all the theatre people are gone for the night, but anticipation drives him on.

When Danny Stoker steps into the auditorium, he sucks in a breath through his teeth and lets it out with a curse. It’s not the original auditorium, it can’t be, but _god _it’s amazing. Tiers of seats, balconies, boxes, even the curtains draped over the stage, all roughly carved out of stone but clearly and undeniably a perfect recreation of the original theatre.

Who could have done something like this? Who _would _have? For the first time he entertains the thought that maybe some of those rumors about Robert Smirke’s more esoteric interests might have been true, because this can’t be new. This has been down here for a long, long time.

He’s halfway down the aisle before he even notices he’s been moving, but of course he is, he’s got to see what this looks like from the stage. Danny lengthens his strides, practically jogging his way up the steps and onto center stage.

His light sweeps across the audience. They’re there too, hundreds of stone faces, rough humanoid shapes all staring right up at him. It’s giving him the creeps, honestly, all those vague suggestions of eyes, and he tries to shove the feeling aside by wishing he’d brought a proper camera setup. He usually doesn’t, that’s not what he’s here for, but he’s never heard of anything even remotely like this. The snaps he takes with his phone are grainy and indistinct, the light too poor to show anything worthwhile.

He isn’t sure what makes him turn; he doesn’t think he saw anything. Maybe it was just a feeling, something competing with the weight of those stone watchers. But he twists to his right, bringing the torch around with him, and there standing in the wings is a clown. An old-fashioned clown, with dark hair, a white face, red geometric cheeks, and a wide-painted red, red mouth. Under the facepaint, it’s mouth – Danny can’t think of it as _he_, for some reason – is doing something horrible and inhuman, something he can’t quite understand. In its right hand it holds a shepherd’s crook, one of those old vaudeville props. He can imagine the clown sweeping it out to snag a performer from off the stage, or an audience member from the front row, dragging them behind the curtains, its face still horrible and empty and–

It moves, ever so slightly, and Danny drops his torch. It falls to the stage with a clatter that echoes painfully loud in the stone auditorium and the bulb shatters, leaving him in near-total darkness, but he’s already running, scrambling down the stairs and up the aisle, retracing his steps and praying he doesn’t stumble. Even if he does, though, he knows he’d keep running on a sprained ankle, on a broken leg, anything to avoid being alone in the dark with that clown.


	7. Day 7: Isolation (Lonely Eyes)

Somehow being married to Peter is even lonelier than being divorced from him. Elias really ought to have learned this by now, but it never fails to sting. It’s a self-indulgent foolishness, of course, to expect anything else from a Lukas, but the fact is that he never intended to fall in love and it’s much too late to extricate himself now.

And so he sits and listens with more attention than it deserves to Peter’s endless, meaningless monologue, pretending it’s a conversation that he might be expected to take part in, pretending that this is a date and not a thinly-veiled pretense at a relationship that’s something more than sex and long absences. Peter smiles at him often, but he never makes eye contact, and Elias has long since given up pretending it doesn’t bother him. There’s nothing he could do or say that would make much of a difference, anyway.

At least when they’re not officially together Peter tries; he flirts and makes actual conversation. He lets himself be Seen. And yet every time Elias caves to him eventually, accepts a proposal and a short ceremony at Moorland House and a honeymoon he mostly spends alone. It’s worth it, in the moment, for the light in Peter’s eyes and the way he kisses him. (And, admittedly, for the inevitable acrimonious divorce, the way Peter will fade into nothingness at a perfectly barbed insult.) There’s about a week, each time, where it feels as though they’re in the same place at the same time.

For now he sits and listens, feeling more alone minute by minute. He could stretch out his legs and brush Peter’s knee with his under the table, but it wouldn’t achieve anything except perhaps getting Peter to grope him in the bathroom before dessert. Instead he sits and listens and knows that his hollow isolation feeds that hunger in Peter that they all suffer from. Everyone always says that marriage is about sacrifice, after all.


	8. Day 8: Stab Wound (Jon)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> cw blood, stitches

His hand has almost stopped bleeding by the time Michael disappears, which probably ought to be unsettling but is mostly a relief; at least he doesn’t have to drip blood all the way to the bathroom. Unfortunately their first aid kit isn’t really stocked for anything worse than papercuts, which, given last year’s events, seems remarkably shortsighted.

It’s painful, but he’s handling it, until he grits his teeth and sticks the wound under the running water. The pain slices all the way up his arm, worse almost than when he was stabbed in the first place, and the blood starts flowing freely again. It’s that, surely, and not the fact that he thinks he can see bone that’s making him dizzy. He groans, in spite of himself.

“Jon?” It’s Martin, of course, calling his name and tapping nervously at the door.

“I’m fine,” he snarls back, but Martin hasn’t waited for confirmation and is already hovering over his shoulder. Jon tries to steady his breaths, determined not to faint in the bathroom in front of a coworker, but it doesn’t seem to be helping. He doesn’t usually find Martin’s cologne offensive but right now everything contributes to his nausea.

At least Martin doesn’t try to touch him, thank God. “There was – I wasn’t looking, it’s just you left your office door open and there was blood on the floor, and – Jesus, Jon!” This last as he catches sight of the jagged hole in Jon’s hand, still staining the water pink in spite of the death grip he has on his own wrist.

“It’s nothing,” Jon forces out, well aware that it’s the least believable thing he’s ever said. Something in him refuses to mention Michael, to admit to his own helplessness in the face of a monster he’d thought to be friendly. “I – I cut myself on – on a bread knife, putting together a sandwich, it’s –”

Martin makes a skeptical noise, but he doesn’t actually object to Jon’s transparent lie; small mercies. “That looks like it’s going to need stitches,” he says instead. “Can I–?” He reaches out, and Jon nods tightly. He hates to let go of his wrist – and god, the throbbing pain won’t stop – but he thinks he needs to hold himself up.

Martin’s hands are gentle but steady as he wraps his fingers around Jon’s wrist and pulls his wounded hand up and out of the sink. “Keep it elevated,” he says, “above your heart. It’ll bleed less. That definitely needs stitches – are you good, for now?” He looks skeptical when Jon nods again, but he’s braced himself against the sink with his good hand, so at least he won’t collapse. “All right. I’m going to go call emergency services. You might,” he adds sharply, “think up a better story to tell them.”

“Right,” Jon says softly, but Martin’s already gone, the door swinging closed with a thump behind him.


	9. Day 9: Shackles (Jon)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Takes place in my [Stay Vicious](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1494203) post-Watcher's Crown/feral!Archivist AU
> 
> cw dubcon bondage

_This is Martin. You trust Martin_, Jon reminds himself as the shackles go on, cold iron wrapped in leather wrapped in invisible spider silk threads. He can’t stop shaking, though, and it can’t be from hunger; Martin had been standing there, looking at him with an unbearable fondness, when the woman had finished her story and started weeping. There was something wrong about the way Martin brushed past her without a second thought, but it’s been so long, and so much has happened since he last saw Martin: the Extinction, the Watcher’s Crown, the world remade. Jon has been running on instinct and hunger for too long to think, and Martin is cupping his hand to Jon’s cheek, thumb digging in under his jaw, and although it pulls him out of the comfortable place where the only thing that matters is the Archivist’s hunger it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to him.

Martin’s brought him back to the Institute, back to Elias’s old office, although Martin seems more comfortable here than he ever was in the Archives. It feels safe here; it feels _right_, and that’s probably why he misses the first careful tugs of the spider’s strings. Because Martin feels _right _too, like Basira does, another servant of the Eye in the Eye’s world, and he’s forgotten how many powers had a grip on Martin before the ritual happened. And now he’s on his knees in Martin’s office, trembling like he’s starving, growing increasingly aware of the parts of Martin that are _wrong_, in spite of how he can still feel Martin’s cool gaze on the back of his neck, in spite of how gently he fastens the shackles together, crossing Jon’s wrists at the small of his back.

He can’t help but fight it; the Web’s touch still sends something in him screaming, and while his instinct is to compel it into submission, more threads still his jaw and tongue before he can speak. He wrenches against his bonds with more than human strength, sure that his body will heal itself before he can do any permanent damage, but his hands are still slick with blood by the time he settles, panting, back on his heels. The room seems to be shrouded in a thick fog, and he can neither see nor sense Martin anywhere near; the vulnerability of his position strikes him like a knife, and he whines, low in his throat.

Then Martin is there behind him again, his hand cool and steady on his back. “It’s all right, Jon,” he says softly. “I’m going to take care of you, since you can’t be trusted to take care of yourself.”

The _wrongness _is still there, the touch of other powers that should not be so strong in Beholding’s world, but Jon is suddenly tired of fighting, tired of it all. He slumps back into Martin’s touch and closes his eyes, trying to ignore the sticky pull of spiderwebs against his skin. He’ll grow used to it in time, he supposes.


	10. Day 11: Stitches (Martin)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw blood, stitches

“Hold still,” Basira says, and Martin hisses through his teeth but he holds still. Her hands are cold and impersonal where they steady his jaw and swipe antiseptic over the gash in his forehead. It’s nothing, really, in spite of the quantity of blood; Martin had tried to tell her as much but she’d just looked steadily at him, first aid case in hand, until he’d sat down and let her patch him up.

  
He’s still not entirely sure what happened. They’d been attacked, monsters coming up through the tunnels and into the Archives, and he remembers his first thought being surprise that he’d never thought to worry about that before. The tunnels had always been safe, somehow. Then one of them had taken a swing at him, he toppled headfirst into one of the sturdier sets of shelves, and he doesn’t remember much more until he opened his eyes to see Melanie leaning over him, absolutely covered in blood. 

  
It’s – it’s surprisingly terrible, actually. Obviously they’d been threatened before, he’d been trapped in his flat for weeks, Jon had been kidnapped, the world was going to end – but to have something crawl straight into the Archives, intent on doing violence, feels more visceral than anything else that’s happened. There’s the feeling of a war zone to the place now, shelves and boxes toppled, blood everywhere, Basira grim and silent and Melanie terrifyingly elated.

  
Basira digs the needle in and Martin says, “Ow,” although she’s numbed it up with something he’s pretty sure isn’t usually available to the general public and it doesn’t hurt so much as it feels wrong, having his skin tugged away from his skull. She ignores him, which is probably just as well. He doesn’t know he could handle sympathy right now. Right now he’s fine; a little nauseous, probably from blood loss or maybe the hit on the head, but he doesn’t feel much. It’s probably shock, and in an hour he’ll go into a panic. He’d very much like to be alone when that happens.

  
“There you go,” Basira says, examining her handiwork with a critical eye. “Might get a badass scar out of it, if you’re lucky.”

  
“Yeah,” Martin mutters. “Hardly deserve it though, do I?” And he hadn’t meant to say that out loud, not really. Basira gives him an inscrutable look, hums softly, but doesn’t say anything. “Thanks,” he says, hoping that if he can’t tell whether it’s sincere for the stitches or sarcastic for the assessment of his usefulness in a fight, she can’t either.

**Author's Note:**

> Please come yell about TMA with me, I have too many feelings  
[@j_quadrifrons](https://twitter.com/j_quadrifrons), [backofthebookshelf](https://backofthebookshelf.tumblr.com)


End file.
